UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Holding the Center: How One Jewish Day School Negotiates Differences in a Pluralistic Community(2010) Selis, Allen H.; Selden, Steven; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study centers on the experiences of students and religious study faculty in the high school division of "CDS," a successful Kindergarten through Twelfth grade Jewish day school that defines itself as a "community" institution. The school affirms a high-profile commitment to including "the widest spectrum of Jewish practice and belief" in its recruiting materials. While the student body comprises individuals who are diverse in their affiliations and beliefs, the school employs a religious studies faculty that overwhelmingly draws from the most theologically conservative subset of the larger community. Almost none of these instructors share the same orientation with respect to religious practice, beliefs or general cultural frames of reference as the students they educate. Nonetheless, the school's administrative leaders claim a high degree of success at creating an embracing community, where individual differences are honored and respected. The purpose of this study was to examine and critically evaluate this claim. By employing a range of classical ethnographic research strategies, including participant observation and individual interviews, this study explores the following question: How does a culturally heterogeneous group of religious studies faculty and students negotiate the challenge of communal participation in the high school division of one Jewish day school? While the results of field work were analyzed using a range of classical anthropological methods, this study makes special use of the communities of practice literature to create an interpretive schema for understanding the cultural life and experiences of this school community. Coding and analysis of field data suggest that a commitment to defer engagement around significant areas of ritual practice as well as the construction of a value system which reinforces the merits of coexistence create a loose framework for the notion of "community" at CDS. These findings expand an emerging literature on pluralism within Jewish institutions and suggest new interpretive tools for understanding the meaning of community within the growing field of pluralistic Jewish community day schools.Item Understanding and Supporting Visual Communication within Costume Design Practice(2009) Bradley, Rachael Leigh; Preece, Jennifer J; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Theatres provide artistic value to many people and generate revenue for communities, yet little research has been conducted to understand or support theatrical designers. Over 1,800 non-profit theatres and 3,522 theatre companies and dinner theatres operate in the United States. In 2008, 11 million people attended 1,587 Broadway shows for a total gross of 894 million dollars. These numbers do not take into account College and community theatres, operas, and ballets, all of which also require costumes. This dissertation studied image search, selection, and use within costume design practice to: 1) understand how image use as a collaborative visual communication tool affects the search and selection process and 2) assist an often overlooked community. Previous research in image search and selection has focused on specific resources or institutions. In contrast, this research used case study methodology to understand image search, selection, and use within the broad context of an image-intensive process. The researcher observed costume designers and other theatre members as they located, selected, shared, discussed, and modified images through an iterative design process resulting in a final set of images, the costumes themselves. The researcher also interviewed participants throughout the design process, photographed artifacts, and conducted a final interview with participants at the end of each case study. The resulting data was coded using grounded theory and guided by previous research. Based on the analysis, the researcher suggests a three-stage model that describes image use in costume design and provides a starting point for understanding image use in other collaborative design practices. Participants used a wide range of analog and digital resources, including personal and institutional collections, but often used the same three search and selection strategies regardless of the resource type. Set building and refinement, image comparison, and tagging were all important features of the image search and selection process but are not well supported in most image search systems. In addition, participants continuously added resources to personal collections for future use on individual productions. This research set out to understand search and selection within the context of collaborative use on a single production, but what became apparent was the central nature of collaboration across productions to the search and selection process itself. Personal networks between costume designers and within the theatre community played a central role in solving challenges costume designers encounter as part of their work. This research bridges a gap in current image research by placing image search and selection within the context of a collaborative design practice. At the same time, it suggests guidelines for developing technology to support a community which has long been overlooked. With additional research, the findings from this research can be extended to apply to the theatrical community as a whole and also to other design professionals.